My 2003

For anyone who didn't get my "I haven't seen you in a year" recap in the past couple of weeks:

As 2003 started I was working on secret stuff that was still pretty new to me. I was working with winter percussion for the first few months of the year as well, but most of my time was at work.

In April I finally got to use my snowboarding season pass on the last weekend of the season. Soundtrack was also announced, which then shipped with Final Cut Pro 4 in June. We got announced as a separate product at MWNY, and that shipped in August.

Lisa and I headed off to our first vacation in a long time, and spent a good week in Catalina. If you're thinking about a trip there, I wouldn't spend any more than 3-4 days, because it's pretty small.

Sometime over the summer I found out that I would be the percussion section caption head for the fall season, so I slowly started working on the music. I'd never written a full percussion book before - some things were easier than I thought, some were harder, but in general it just took a lot of time.

My parents came out for their annual visit, and we realized that we're running out of touristy things to do. We ended up looking at a lot of flowers, which was better than antiques at least.

I went back home for our homecoming game at ISU - well, I went back to see people, and the game was the excuse.

It seemed like the year to take off on vacations, so Lisa and I joined my parents and other relatives in Las Vegas for Thanksgiving.

And for the last 10 days of 2003 I came back to Iowa to visit parents, friends, and relatives. It has also allowed me to end the year the same way I began it - with a cold :)

Reading blogs

My 'blogs' submenu used to be a cute little thing, but I now have way more than I can check on a regular basis. I stumbled across Bloglines recently, and it seems like it might help, at least a little bit.

I've kept away from RSS readers like NetNewsWire in the past, mostly because I don't like having another app sitting around that will eventually lead me right back to my web browser. This site does all of the work in the browser, and takes away my main complaint. So I have to create more :)

Well, since blogspot sites don't do RSS feeds, it doesn't work for my site or Amul's, and various others. It also seems to have a strange bug with some sites where it doesn't automatically show me the newest content - although that could be a problem specific to some of these blogs.

Send me a note if you really want me to add an RSS feed to my site - and I'll spend more time figuring out how to upgrade my blogger account. It's not very easy to find from their site right now.

I also found the pref for titles today, so look - I have titles. Wheeeeee

Thanksgiving Reloaded

Ok, more TG recaps.

I had a big paragraph here about the marching stuff on Saturday, but it seemed eerily familiar. I guess I should read my blog more.

Sunday was spent sleeping and playing Final Fantasy X. Actually, that pretty well describes Monday and Tuesday too. I'm playing the game to study for our winter percussion show (that's what I keep telling myself anyway), which is using FFX music.

On Wednesday the real vacation began, and we flew off to Vegas. It's shocking to go to bars and restaurants outside of CA because the smoke really gets to me - Vegas is especially bad because people smoke everywhere. The dry air wasn't fun either - I don't think I've ever woken up in the night because of thirst before, but it happened every night we were there.

We did all the Las Vegas strip touristy stuff: the Bellagio water shows, see the free tigers at the Mirage, gamble, see the Fremont street lights, avoid the people "thwap"ing pamphlets for escorts, etc.
One night I'm pretty sure Vince Neil was having dinner in the same restaurant as us, and the night before we came back we saw BB King in concert. Awesome.

Doh!

I've been using Safari for almost a year now, and I was finally pointed to the "Status Bar" option in the view menu last week. That's right, I didn't even find it myself - someone told me about it after I complained that it didn't have one.

TG

Looks like I'll follow suit and post the "I'm back from Thanksgiving" posting...

So I'm back from Thanksgiving. It was good to get away from the usual things I do, and good to get out of the valley for a while. Any time I'm gone from work long enough to stop thinking about it is good as far as I'm concerned.

And I also _mostly_ forgot about marching band stuff. We finished the season the weekend before TG, which helped. Of course now I have an entire two days before the winter season starts up. (sigh) I'm not two down though, since the last day of marching band went well... no, well, it ended well anyway. During the day we had a broken timpani head, a sick kid, flat tire, missing equipment, and cold weather... but in the end everyone felt really good about the performances and how well the group has done.

I'll write more about my break later, but for now here are the two things that summarize it well:
Final Fantasy X
Las Vegas